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Khamenei long obstructed peace for Israel. But his influence was waning before his assassination.
(JTA) — Six days after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini seized power in Iran on Feb. 11, 1979, he hosted his first foreign dignitary: the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, Yasser Arafat.
Arafat, seen then by the Americans and the Israelis as a terrorist, was an ardent opponent of the emerging Israel-Egypt peace deal. Khomeini expelled Israeli diplomats and handed the embassy building over to the PLO.
Arafat relayed the message he got from Khomeini: After the new Islamic regime consolidated its hold over Iran it would turn to “victory of Israel.”
“Today Iran, tomorrow Palestine,” Arafat told reporters.
The symbolism was not lost on the Egyptian, Israeli and American negotiators hammering out the peace deal in Camp David: According to reports at the time, they redoubled their efforts to get to a peace deal before the new Islamist regime in Iran could scuttle it.
Keeping Iran from getting in the way of peace has been a preoccupation of Israeli and U.S. governments from then until the Israeli strike Sunday that killed Khomeini’s successor as Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, a key aim of the latest U.S.-Israel war against the country.
The regime’s hopes of stymying peace scored successes at time, particularly in the 1990s, when the terrorist group it backed, Hamas, undermined the peace process with repeated and massive terrorist attacks on Israeli targets. More recently it spectacularly backfired, when Sunni Muslim states fearful of Shia Iran’s adventurism in the region shed years of resistance to peace with Israel and forged ties under the Abraham Accords.
Iran, with its massive military capabilities, its oil wealth, its appetite for regional hegemony and its obdurate Islamism may have been the foremost obstacle to Israel’s integration into the region since 1979.
“Iran was a continually negative actor trying to prevent any normalization of Israel in the Middle East,” Joel Rubin, a former deputy assistant secretary of state during the Obama administration, said in an interview.
Khomeini had since the early 1960s cast Israel as an enemy of Islam and deplored the young Jewish state’s relationship with Iran and the monarchy he cast aside in 1979. In a landmark 1980 speech he listed four “world devourers” as the United States, communism, Israel and Zionism.
Khomeini lost little time in making good on his pledge to Arafat to seek Israel’s defeat. In 1982, after Israel invaded Lebanon, Iranian agents cultivated ties among fellow Shia who resented Israel’s presence. Within a year, Hezbollah was established, becoming one of Israel’s most implacable enemies.
Working with Iran, Hezbollah delivered some of the bloodiest attacks on Israelis and on Jews in the subsequent decades, among them the bombing of Israel’s embassy in Buenos Aires in March 1992, killing 29, and then the bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center in the same city in 1994, killing 85 people, the deadliest attack in Argentine history.
“May this news bring relief to the families and contribute to the acknowledgment of responsibility and to the fight against terrorism and impunity,” the pro-Israel Argentine government said Sunday after Khamenei’s assassination was confirmed.
The timing of the Argentina attacks was not coincidental: The George H.W. Bush administration had in 1991 convened talks in Madrid, bringing around the table for the first time Israel and most of the Arab states in the region. Two years later, Israel and the Palestinians, under the aegis of the Clinton administration, launched the Oslo peace talks.
Arafat by then had done a famous 180-degree turn, embracing peace with Israel and appearing with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on the White House lawn. Iran, wary of Arafat since he first expressed openness to peace talks in 1988, had begun to cultivate ties with Hamas, the Islamist group that rejected any accommodation with Israel.
By 1994, Iran’s support for Hamas, according to officials of Arafat’s Palestinian Authority, was in the tens of millions of dollars. The money funded terrorist attacks that undermined Israeli confidence in the peace process, propelling Oslo skeptic Benjamin Netanyahu to the prime ministership in 1996. The attacks included suicide missions — a method that Hamas operatives had learned from Hezbollah trainers in Lebanon.
Oslo petered out in the late 1990s and then exploded into the Second Intifada in late 2000. In 2006, when it appeared that the second Bush administration was making strides in getting the Israelis and the Palestinians back to the table, Hezbollah, backed by Iran, launched a war against Israel.
Khamenei, who succeeded Khomeini in 1989, only intensified the country’s focus on confronting Israel, spending billions of dollars on terrorist proxies including Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthi militias and investing in his own Islamic Revolutionary Guard Forces and its Quds Force, which both trains proxies and conducts its own operations abroad.
Khamenei periodically posted on social media his “plan for the elimination of Israel.” When Arafat died in 2004, Khamenei reviled him as “a traitor and a fool.”
Khamenei’s hostility to Israel was ideological: He would periodically deride Arab and Palestinian leaders who said the conflict should be left primarily to the Palestinians to resolve. Palestine was an “issue for the Islamic world,” he said.
“Khamenei was critical” to obstructing peace with Israel, said Trita Parsi, an Iranian-born analyst who is the executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. “There were others in the system that were more amenable to the idea of adopting a more flexible position on Israel in order to resolve their problems with the United States.”
Confronting Israel was also a means of stemming U.S. influence in the region. A key rationale for U.S. and Israeli peacemaking in the 1990s was to placate other conflicts and focus on Iran.
“The view was that Iran was the bigger threat, and so for Israel’s peace camp it was, ‘Let’s get over the Palestinian issue, to consolidate support in the Arab world, to enable us to deal with that bigger Iranian threat,’” Rubin said.
Matt Duss, the executive vice president at the Center for International Policy and a former foreign policy adviser to Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, the progressive leader, said Iran was able to exploit resentment against American and Israeli influence in the region because at times the influence was itself toxic.
“Iran supported terrorist groups that supported violence against civilians, horrific violence, both against its own people and people in the region and elsewhere,” he said. “Iran clearly exploited anger at both Israel and the United States for its own political ends. It did not invent that opposition. It did not invent those grievances. It successfully exploited and weaponized them.”
Parsi, too, noted that Iran did not operate in a vacuum: It at times exploited existing tensions stoked by Israeli actions.
“If there wasn’t a problem at the outset, there’s no way for an outside power to be able to take advantage of it and be able to push for it, and we’ve seen that as long as the situation on the ground between Israel and Palestine remains what it is, and you have more settlements being built and disregard for international law,” he said.
Iran was influential but not instrumental in inhibiting peace, said Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and a top Middle East peace negotiator in Republican and Democratic administrations.
Iran looked askance at Israeli talks with Iran’s ally, Syria, in the 1990s, but ultimately it was Syrian President Hafez Assad’s obduracy that scuttled those talks, Miller said.
“The major determinant was the inability, in my judgment, of Assad to understand that if he wanted more than Sadat got, he would have to give at least as much as Sadat got,” Miller said, referring to Anwar Sadat, the Egyptian president assassinated in 1981 for making peace with Israel.
“Assad was not willing to do nearly as much on the issue of personal diplomacy, public diplomacy, as what Sadat did,” Miller continued. So, no, Iran was not the major constraint or the major reason why we don’t have an Israeli-Syrian agreement.”
Iranian backing, training and funding for terrorist attacks inhibited popular support for peace, said Shira Efron, the Pentagon-aligned RAND Institute’s Israel policy chair.
“It was tangible in the sense that you see Iran’s different ways of altering the security situation” with terrorist attacks. Iran’s hand and this was always their plan,” she said. “Khamenei was talking about it, this idea of creating the ‘ring of fire’ around Israel — it originated in Tehran.”
The “ring of fire” — the threat to Israel composed of militias in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria and as far afield as Yemen and Iraq — was the construct that Hamas hoped would trigger a massive multi-front war when its terrorists raided Israel on Oct. 7, launching the conflict that culminated this weekend with the U.S.-Israel attacks on Iran.
Khamenei hoped that the ring of fire would prevail in a looming conflict with the United States, tweeting just weeks before his death, “The Americans should know if they start a war, this time it will be a regional war.”
But Israel and the United States launched the current war without fear of igniting the region, in part because of the Abraham Accords, the normalization agreements with Arab countries near Iran. Those accords came about in part because those countries saw working with Israel and the United States as the most effective means of stemming Iran’s hostile adventurism.
Some of those countries are now reaping consequences of allying with Israel, taking blows from Iranian missiles and drones. Some are emphasizing that they reserve the right to join the fight against Iran.
“Look at the proximity between the Islamic Republic of Iran and key Gulf states which have either made peace with Israel or want to,” Miller said. “How could anybody in their right mind argue that Iran has been the major constraint, or even a constraint?”
Iran’s regime, Rubin said, was ultimately the author of its own diminishment. “Imagine Iran had said, ‘We’re going to back peace. We’re going to respect the Palestinians whatever they decide. We’re not going to undermine their politics. We’re not going to support Hamas in the case that they blow up Israelis and kill Palestinians who talk to the Israelis. We’re going to actually be a constructive player.’”
With Khamenei assassinated, the question is whether Iran’s future leadership might take more of that approach. That’s the hope of the United States and Israel, which have urged the Iranian people to take hold of their destinies following the war. But the Islamic Republic swears that it is strong and has said it would name a successor to Khamenei imminently. According to reports that emerged after his death, the CIA has assessed that it is likely that a hardliner, perhaps with ties to the IRGC and certainly with opposition to Israel, is the most likely to take his place.
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Synagogue attacks were part of massive ISIS-inspired plot last week, FBI says
(JTA) — A 21-year-old man from Valencia, Pennsylvania, suggested poisoning food in synagogues as part of a mass attack in support of the Islamic State group last week, according to the FBI.
The suspect, Jonathan Kramer, said in an online forum using the pseudonym “Hamza Al Rashid” that “i wish to inject ricin or cyanide into places such as grocery stores inside water/food with a syringe, or going to food events, preferably synagogues and putting the chemicals in their food and drink…,” according to a sworn FBI affidavit.
The prospective poisoning was part of a broader plot of mass violence that included “repeated attempts to encourage and coordinate violence through encrypted platforms, such as advising others on attack methods, discussing chemical poisons, arson, vehicle attacks, drone delivery explosives and firearm based assaults,” FBI Special Agent in Charge Richard Evanchec said at a press conference last week.
The Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh said in a security update on Friday that no synagogue had been specified by the FBI. , “We are in close contact with our law enforcement partners and federal prosecutors, and if we learn of anything concerning, we will share that immediately,” the organization noted.
Assistant Attorney General for National Security John Eisenberg announced last Tuesday that Kramer was “preparing for a mass shooting that could have taken many lives, having already secured a rifle and approximately 190 rounds of ammunition for what he called his ‘mission.”
Efforts to reach Kramer’s public defender Jake Morrison were unsuccessful.
FBI agents arrested Kramer in a hotel parking lot in Cranberry, Pennsylvania, the Justice Department said. They seized a semiautomatic rifle, five rifle magazines, a rifle bipod and scope, a total of 190 rounds of rifle ammunition and about 30 knives following a search of him, his house and his hotel room.
Kramer was charged with receiving a firearm and ammunition believing they would be used to commit terrorism. He appeared in court last Wednesday to waive a preliminary hearing, according to CBS News. A court date has not been set for Kramer’s next proceedings, the network reported.
Kramer had been on the FBI’s radar since 2023, when he was charged by Pennsylvania state authorities “for his role in a plot to commit a mass casualty incident” and sent to a juvenile detention facility, FBI special agent Gregory Battaglia said in a sworn affidavit.
Nearly eight years ago, 11 worshippers were killed at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in the deadliest antisemitic attack in U.S. history.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Proposed U.S. $24.3 billion sale of F-35 fighter jets to Saudi Arabia advances
(JTA) — The State Department has approved a possible $24.3 billion sale of 48 F-35 fighter jets to Saudi Arabia — a move that would make the kingdom the second Middle Eastern country after Israel to have the world’s most powerful combat aircraft.
“This proposed sale will support the foreign policy and national security objectives of the United States by improving the security of a major non-NATO ally,” the department said in a statement.
Israel wants the sale attached to a normalization deal with Saudi Arabia, but that doesn’t appear to be on the horizon. However, there is a small chance that Congress could keep the sale from happening.
When President Donald Trump first confirmed that he was considering the sale last November, Israeli officials told Axios that while they don’t oppose the sale itself, they wanted it “to be subject to Saudi normalization with Israel.”
Although Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly brushed off the deal’s significance last fall, a security source at the time warned on CNN that the possibility of Saudi Arabia acquiring “the same capabilities” as Israel was “very concerning.”
The prime minister was more vocal in his opposition to a July announcement from Trump that he was weighing selling the advanced jets to Turkey as well, telling CNN that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is “not exactly a model ally of the United States.”
Israel has already purchased 50 F-35 jets, in two procurement rounds that occurred in 2016 and in 2017, according to the Israeli Defense Ministry. However, local media reports indicate that two of the 50 have yet to arrive, meaning that just 48 are on the ground – the same number of planes that the State Department has approved for Saudi Arabia’s potential purchase.
Israel would have many more F-35s than Saudi Arabia for the time being, because its Defense Ministry announced in 2024 that it would be procuring 25 more of the planes, slated to begin arriving in 2028. Earlier this year, the Defense Ministry revealed that it would be procuring yet another squadron of the jets, although the quantity remained unclear.
Congressional approval is not assured; wariness of the Saudi regime, stemming in part from the state-sanctioned 2018 murder of a U.S.-based journalist in Turkey, crosses party lines.
The U.S. Arms Export Control Act requires the executive branch of the government to notify Congress regarding major defense equipment sales to most countries. Congress can then deem a country ineligible to participate in a sale through a joint resolution. The president can then veto the resolution, which Congress would need a two-thirds supermajority to override.
Additionally, U.S. law requires the president to ensure that Israel maintains “a qualitative military edge over military threats” when considering arms sales to other Middle Eastern countries. Israel, per the law, must be able “to counter and defeat any credible conventional military threat” from both other nations and “non-state actors.”
“The proposed sale of this equipment and support will not alter the military balance in the region,” the State Department said on Thursday. It called Saudi Arabia “a force for political stability and economic progress in the Gulf region,” adding that the sale would help “deter current and future threats by strengthening its homeland defense.”
The department maintained that not only would the sale improve Saudi Arabia’s defense capabilities, but it would also boost “interoperability” with both U.S. forces and other players from NATO and the region.
As for the potential deal’s logistics, Saudi Arabia has requested 48 of Lockheed Martin’s F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter Jets, as well as 49 Pratt & Whitney engines, according to the State Department.
The kingdom is also seeking to acquire other non-major defense equipment, such as cryptographic devices, precision navigation, secure communications, simple key loaders and support for electronic warfare databases, maintenance and personnel training.
Producing and delivering these planes can take many years.
Meanwhile, just a day before Trump’s announcement, The New York Times surfaced intelligence concerns that China could acquire F-35 technology by spying on Saudi Arabia or through its partnerships with the kingdom.
U.S. House Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, a Democrat from Illinois, warned in a statement on X that “Beijing has spent decades stealing American intellectual property” and that this deal could “help them do it.”
“Our own intelligence community is warning that it could put the crown jewels of American military technology within reach of the Chinese Communist Party,” Krishnamoorthi added.
The Biden administration reportedly ended a past F-35 deal with the United Arab Emirates — secured by the first Trump administration — due to similar concerns about the country’s connections to China, as well as to Russia.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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After outcry, Texas lieutenant governor says schools should teach Holocaust books ‘Night,’ ‘Anne Frank’
(JTA) — The lieutenant governor of Texas says his recent call for the state’s public schools to remove “over 2,000 titles” of “dirty, filthy and vulgar books” was not meant to include books about the Holocaust.
Dan Patrick’s statement, provided exclusively to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Friday, comes after a month of confusion following a press conference in which he and a conservative Christian activist threatened schools with potential loss of state funding if they did not comply with his directive to purge their libraries.
“I believe Texas students must learn about the Holocaust, and that includes reading books such as ‘Night’ by Elie Wiesel, ‘The Diary of Anne Frank,’ and other books about the Holocaust,” Patrick told JTA, singling out two books on the removal list he had promoted – one of which, “Night,” that he previously explicitly called for removal from middle schools.
Patrick added that his initiative was “focused on age-inappropriate, sexually explicit books in public school libraries across Texas.” At his earlier press conference, he had directed viewers to an online list compiled by an activist group that features several books about the Holocaust and Jewish identity.
Patrick’s threats have teeth. In Texas, lieutenant governors are more powerful than in many other states, playing central roles in shaping the budget and determining the legislative agenda.
Patrick also appeared to walk back some of the harsher proclamations from his Aug. 19 press conference, at which the Republican had stated, “We’re coming for the books.”
“As the law states, local communities have the right to make their own decisions about their public school libraries,” he told JTA Friday.
The lieutenant governor, who is up for reelection this fall, appeared at the conference with Bonnie Wallace, the head of the activist group Recover America, and told viewers to “go to RecoverAmerica.com.” That group has circulated a list of more than 2,100 “Harmful Books in Libraries.” Its list, which it describes as “books with harmful, sexually explicit, and vulgar content,” includes more than a dozen titles of particular import to Jewish readers.
Recover America’s flagged books include both volumes of Art Spiegelman’s “Maus,” a comic-book adaptation of Frank’s diary and Bernard Malamud’s novel of a blood libel “The Fixer” — all books that have been removed from school districts in Texas and other states in the past amid broader conservative-led library culture wars. In some cases those books were restored to the districts following public outcry, but spurred deeper dialogue about the state of Holocaust education and antisemitism awareness in public schools.
Patrick’s latest push would go much further than a handful of districts, affecting the more than 5.5 million students in public schools across the state.
One book of particular contention on Recover America’s list was “Night,” Elie Wiesel’s bestselling memoir of surviving Auschwitz and Buchenwald, which has been taught in schools for decades. After a Houston Chronicle story noted the book’s inclusion on the Recover America “harmful” list, Patrick initially doubled down on “Night,” saying that it was not appropriate for middle schools owing to its “violence.”
“If ‘Night,’ by Elie Wiesel, were made into a movie, it would likely be rated R,” Patrick wrote on the social network X on Aug. 26. “‘Night,’ which includes depictions of graphic violence and the machine-gunning of babies, should not be available to sixth graders in middle-school libraries. High school is more age-appropriate.”
His tweet appeared to contradict the state’s own K-12 required reading list, passed this summer, which mandates that “Night” be taught in the eighth grade beginning in 2030.
Now, in response to questions from JTA, the lieutenant governor said he would defer to the Texas State Board of Education on the appropriate grade to teach “Night.”
“The State Board of Education decides the appropriate grade level for books and will determine whether ‘Night,’ by Elie Wiesel, is at the appropriate grade level,” Patrick told JTA in his statement.
He continued to insist that books in schools should be held to “FCC standards,” referring to the Federal Communications Commission, an agency that governs broadcasting content and does not regulate publishing.
The head of the Texas Holocaust, Genocide and Antisemitism Advisory Commission, a governor-appointed panel which advised the state on the inclusion of “Night” and other Holocaust texts on its required reading list, did not return a JTA request for comment.
In a statement, the Texas Educational Authority, which drafted the required-reading list, told JTA, “When Texas students learn about the Holocaust, they will be exposed to the horrors of the Holocaust. That is why the SBOE placed the book in 8th Grade to ensure age appropriateness for students.”
At the Emmys this week, when “The Librarians,” a documentary about librarians facing book removal threats, won an award, retired Texas librarian Carolyn Foote joined the producers on the stage and held up a copy of “Night” in protest.
“I felt like it was very symbolic to bring ‘Night,’” Foote, a subject of the film and a co-founder of the librarian activist group FReadom Fighters, told JTA. “Having read it, I just know the importance of not forgetting our past. And that’s part of Elie Wiesel’s whole legacy, is remembrance, and so it just felt very important for me to carry that book, coming from Texas.” Another librarian onstage for the win held up “Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation.”
Elisha Wiesel, Elie’s son and chair of the Elie Wiesel Foundation, told JTA that “Texas deserves credit for recognizing that Holocaust education belongs in the eighth-grade curriculum.” Yet, the younger Wiesel suggested, Patrick’s concerns about the book’s violence were misplaced.
“‘Night’ contains violence because the Holocaust was violent; its purpose is not to shock young people, but to help them understand where hatred and indifference can lead,” he wrote in an email. “With context and guidance, students should not be shielded from this history. They should be equipped to confront it.”
Despite having directed viewers to Recover America’s book list during his press conference, Patrick’s new statement to JTA said, “I do not have a book list.” He pointed instead to a law passed in the state legislature in 2025 regulating school books that he said districts were required to follow.
Yet some districts in the state have removed every book on Recover America’s list from their own libraries out of fear of losing funding, Foote told JTA. While the list nominally contains a ratings system, many of the books do not have a rating.
Besides “Night,” “Maus,” “Anne Frank’s Diary” and “The Fixer,” other books about Judaism and the Holocaust on Recover America’s list of “Harmful Books” include:
- “Annexed,” a young-adult novel about Peter van Pels, who hid in the Amsterdam annex with Anne Frank
- “The Berlin Boxing Club,” a young-adult historical novel based on German boxer Max Schmeling, who helped young Jews during Hitler’s rise to power
- “Black, White and Jewish,” a memoir by Rebecca Walker, the mixed-race Jewish daughter of author Alice Walker
- “Caste: The Origins of our Discontents,” a nonfiction book analyzing the “caste systems” of Nazi Germany. “Caste” had been included on an earlier, Wallace-spearheaded list of books for removal from a Texas public library in a case that the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear in 2025, allowing the removals to proceed.
- “Kasher in the Rye,” a memoir by Jewish comedian Moshe Kasher
- “Pride: the story of Harvey Milk and the Rainbow Flag,” a children’s picture-book biography of the pioneering Jewish LGBTQ legislator
- “Sophie’s Choice,” the bestselling Holocaust novel for adults
- “The Violin Maker’s Daughter,” a historical novel about a Jewish family of musicians during the Holocaust
- “White Bird,” a young-reader graphic novel about a Jewish girl in Nazi-occupied France
In response to JTA sharing a list of the above books, Patrick’s statement mentioned only “Night” and Anne Frank by name. The Recover America list is largely made up of romance and fantasy novels, many with an LGBTQ element, while also including classics such as “The Glass Menagerie” and “Cat’s Cradle” and some picture books for children.
Recover America did not immediately return a JTA request for comment Friday on Patrick’s new statement. Wallace, the group’s leader who has also appeared on Patrick’s podcast, previously told the Houston Chronicle that she had “thought long and hard” about including “Night” on her list.
She ultimately did so, she said, because “an eighth-grade student is 13 years old. Do they need to read about soldiers massacring, throwing up babies, and killing them with machine guns?”
She added, “It’s not to say this doesn’t happen in life. And the Holocaust was maybe the worst tragedy in the history of the world.”
For Cameron Samuels, a Jewish alum of Texas public schools and founder of the activist group Students Engaged in Advancing Texas, such efforts do not help Jewish students.
“Non-Jewish people are deciding for us what’s best, and making this public policy,” Samuels said. “We can’t readily access these books and stories. And that makes students feel alone. It also means that our classroom peers are not learning authentic Jewish narratives.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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